Two of the poems of _Men and Women_ are pages tragic-grotesque and pathetic-grotesque from the history of religion. In _The Heretic s Tragedy_ John, Master of the Temple, burns alive in Paris square for his sins against the faith and Holy Church; the glow of the blazing larch and pine almost reaches the reader of the stanzas; the great petals of this red rose of flame bend towards him; the gust of sulphur offends his nostrils. And the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a mingled passion, compounded of delight in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the Lord's house. Yet though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehow we are made to feel that when John the apostate, bound in the flames and gagged, prays to Jesus Christ to save him, that prayer may have been answered. This passage from the story of the age of faith was not selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or historical but artistic. _Holy Cross Day_, a second fragment from history, does not fall from the sublime to the ridiculous but rises from the ridiculous to the sublime. The picture of the close-packed Jews tumbling or sidling churchwards to hear the Christian sermon (for He saith "Compel them to come in") and to partake of heavenly grace has in it something of Rembrandt united with something of Callot. Such a crew of devout impostors is at once comic and piteous. But while they are cared for in the merciful bowels of the Church, and groan out the expected compunction, their ancient piety is not extinct; their hearts burn in them with the memory of Jacob's House and of Jerusalem. Christ at least was of their kindred, and if they wronged Him in past time, they will not wrong Him now by naming these who outrage and insult them after His name.